Weekend Miscellania
Jan. 25th, 2015 06:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjIt has been an oddly assorted but productive weekend. Saturday the AT&T guy came to set me up because I'm switching my tv and internet over to them, joining my cell/data service and discarding my landline entirely -- though I still have to deal with Astound to cancel with them. Nothing particularly wrong with Astound, it's just that I was re-pricing services since I wanted to drop the landline and cut back on the tv channels, and AT&T had the better deal. I still need to set up my new Time Capsule on the new network. (This handily enables me to troubleshoot anything that occurs during the setup while still having a connection through the old system.) Of course, I don't actually need the Time Capsule to be the wifi hub, but I do need it for my automatic backups. And it's easier to configure the wifi name/pw through that device.
Saturday, I also dealt with the first round of editorial comments on The Mystic Marriage. The "first round" is the first nine chapters. This is approximately 1/4-1/5 of the book, but given that much of the requested revisions had to do with bringing the reader up to speed on continuing characters, I've been given the impression that there will be less to do in the remainder. So that's been taken care of and e-mailed back.
I dropped by Home Depot and picked up a lockable storage box for the back of my car, which will make me feel a little better about the times I need to leave attractive objects in it. The box wouldn't stand up to a sustained assault with bolt cutters, but the idea is discouragement. They had onion sets in the garden department, so I actually started the year's vegetable gardening today by putting in some Sweet Spanish Reds and Walla Wallas. They do nicely getting started in the cold.
And then I got distracted by working on my Due Dilligence for the Golden Crown "readers' choice" awards. This is the "Goldie" award category voted on by the GCLS membership and there are 43 books nominated. Now there's no way I'm going to read all those books just to have an informed vote, but I've done a first pass by checking out the online previews and reading enough of each to whittle the list down a bit. Everyone has their own approach to evaluating books, but I start from a baseline position that a book should be well written from a technical standpoint. I'm not just talking about basic spelling and grammar (which, goodness knows, is sometimes an issue), but about sentence structure, narrative style, the approach to point of view and description. I can evaluate all that within five pages. So I've made my first pass and have a personal short-list selected.
And now I really really need to make some more moves on that "start of the year complete housecleaning" thing.
Saturday, I also dealt with the first round of editorial comments on The Mystic Marriage. The "first round" is the first nine chapters. This is approximately 1/4-1/5 of the book, but given that much of the requested revisions had to do with bringing the reader up to speed on continuing characters, I've been given the impression that there will be less to do in the remainder. So that's been taken care of and e-mailed back.
I dropped by Home Depot and picked up a lockable storage box for the back of my car, which will make me feel a little better about the times I need to leave attractive objects in it. The box wouldn't stand up to a sustained assault with bolt cutters, but the idea is discouragement. They had onion sets in the garden department, so I actually started the year's vegetable gardening today by putting in some Sweet Spanish Reds and Walla Wallas. They do nicely getting started in the cold.
And then I got distracted by working on my Due Dilligence for the Golden Crown "readers' choice" awards. This is the "Goldie" award category voted on by the GCLS membership and there are 43 books nominated. Now there's no way I'm going to read all those books just to have an informed vote, but I've done a first pass by checking out the online previews and reading enough of each to whittle the list down a bit. Everyone has their own approach to evaluating books, but I start from a baseline position that a book should be well written from a technical standpoint. I'm not just talking about basic spelling and grammar (which, goodness knows, is sometimes an issue), but about sentence structure, narrative style, the approach to point of view and description. I can evaluate all that within five pages. So I've made my first pass and have a personal short-list selected.
And now I really really need to make some more moves on that "start of the year complete housecleaning" thing.
